Posted By Liz Ryan On November 28, 2012 @ 5:47 pm In Work Advice | No Comments

Dear Liz,

I wrote my first Pain letter after reading your article about Pain letters last week. Hurrah! I got a call from the hiring manager the next day. I have an interview set up for next week.

Now I am avid to write a bunch more Pain letters, but I am curious. When the hiring manager called me to set up the interview for next week, I had already sent in a standard cover letter with my resume, weeks ago. I never heard anything back. Why did the hiring manager respond to my Pain letter so quickly, after ignoring my earlier application?

Thanks,

Becca

Dear Becca,

I don’t know the manager of whom you speak, of course, but I have a few ideas. Managers are overwhelmed these days, and so are Human Resources people and recruiters. They are awash in paper and electrons, barraged with resumes and challenged to keep track of the jobs they’re trying to fill, much less the individual candidates. It’s not a good situation. Corporate America (and startup America, and institutional and not-for-profit America too) is hiring again, but there aren’t enough people to manage the hiring process efficiently.

As a result, candidates get lost in the sauce. They send in applications and hear nothing. It’s a national crisis, in fact, but companies aren’t in a rush to staff up their HR teams and improve their selection pipelines so far. Maybe now that the election is over, they’ll give their HR executives some help, but in the meantime, the Black Hole is your worst enemy as a job-seeker, because it eats resumes for lunch.

Pain Letters sent with Human-Voiced Resumes work because they speak to the real pain behind a job ad, the pain that keeps hiring managers up at night. They don’t drone on about your talents. Why would an overstressed hiring manager care what you think of yourself? He or she doesn’t know you. You have no credibility with him or her. You can’t trumpet your fabulousness with any authority, but you can talk about something more important in this equation than your background. You can talk about him or her, the hiring manager.

We start a Pain Letter with the Hook — acknowledgement of something cool, and specific, that the company has done recently – because people like to read about themselves and their accomplishments (and who can blame them)? No one on this planet gets enough acknowledgement, and hiring managers are no exception.

When you show up with a letter that says “Great job winning the Greenest Employer Award from the City of Dallas” you show the hiring manager three important things. One is that you’re awake, you’re tuned in, and you’re paying attention to the business/community ecosystem around you. That’s way, way different from the typical cover letter that begins with “Dear Hiring Manager, I was intrigued by your job opening…”

The second thing you demonstrated with your Pain Letter – Human-Voiced Resume combo is that you have already lived part of the movie your hiring manager is living through now. When you talk about business pain and your experience with it, you’re showing the hiring manager something incredibly significant. You’re showing insight. The last thing your Pain Letter demonstrates is that you have the mojo to step outside the traditional Black Hole hiring process.

You don’t need to grovel to get a good job – in fact, the better the job, the less grovelling could help you get it. People who want you to crawl over successively higher piles of broken glass in the job search process don’t get you, and therefore they don’t deserve you. The world is changing fast. People who run their careers like entrepreneurs are the people who are thriving in the new-millennium workplace. Pain Letters are one vehicle for finding your voice on the job search, and continuing to find your voice and grow your flame throughout your career.

Imagine going to work as yourself, rather than as a suited-up, inauthentic version of yourself? That’s what we are after. The Pain Letter is one of the vortices that will help you get there. Now that you’re fired up and things are hopping, why not write three more Pain Letters today?